Tam Joseph
It would however be erroneous to create the impression that Joseph’s
work is relentless strident in its tone. Native Girl with Fetish is a 1987
painting by the artist. Characteristically witty and slightly caustic, it
features a young African woman, nude, reclining on her bed. It is daytime,
and through the bedroom window behind her, we can see part of an urban street.
Incidentally, the painting is set in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast,
one of the countries in West Africa (4).
The young woman reclines on her bed, partially draped in its sheets. And
she reads a copy of Elle magazine, complete with the seemingly obligatory
blonde-haired, white face on the cover. The viewer is at once drawn to the
striking visual contrast between the African girl's dark and stunning complexion,
and the pink-skinned, blonde-haired cover girl.
But
what completes the bizarre composition of the painting is the portrait of
Pope John Paul II that looks down, cheekily, at the naked girl from her
bedroom wall. The scene is extraordinary. And it is this extraordinary-ness
that gives the painting its impact. The native girl is obvious - it is she
who so strikingly occupies the length of the painting. But what is the fetish?
The Pope or the magazine? To a degree, we might consider them to be mutually
exclusive, and that they are in direct competition with each other for the
girl's attention. But we might also consider the magazine and the image
of the pontiff to be illustrative of the same thing – the Europeanisation
of Africa. It is this tension between the painting’s three elements
that accounts for much of the painting's impact. After all, aren't the Pope
and the magazine symbols of much the same thing? In effect, the fetish -
with all its Western implications of paganism – is not some or other
African icon of superstition and primitivism. Instead, the fetish becomes
the mass of largely alien sensibilities, such as Catholicism (as represented
in the cheeky portrait of the Pope) and the assorted, highly problematic
notions that are embodied in magazines such as Elle, with its highly racialised
and prescriptive notions of beauty. And yet, within the painting, there
is harmony. The painting triumphs because by irreverently and cleverly juxtaposing
the cover girl with the Pope, they effectively cancel the power they would
each have if they alone could claim the Native Girl's attention. The girl
relaxes, contented, triumphant, embracing both Pope and cover girl, yet
unwilling to surrender herself to either.